1. Field
This disclosure relates generally to mobile communications systems, and more particularly to tracking the location of mobile workers using mobile communications devices.
2. Background
Mobile workers in recent years have increasingly become equipped with wireless communications devices. Both the mobile worker and the businesses that employ these workers increasingly rely on such devices to send and receive tasks, status information, and communications in general. Such wireless communications devices initially included pagers that a dispatch or other party could use to send various messages to the mobile worker, such as messages to call a particular number and/or text messages. The wireless communications devices evolved to provide voice connections such as with cellular telephones, and have become increasingly complex in recent years with the ability to provide voice communications and send/receive data and text messages over a wireless communications device capable of both voice and two-way data and text communications. In many instances, mobile workers receive dispatch to jobs over such devices, acknowledge the dispatch and accept/decline the jobs over such devices and periodically update the status of a job using such devices.
More recently, communications devices have incorporated position sensing components such as a global positioning system (GPS) receivers. GPS receivers rely on a signal received from various GPS satellites to determine a location of the GPS receiver to a fairly high degree of accuracy. Such position sensing components may be used to monitor the position and place or location of a mobile worker. In some instances, the wireless communications device will periodically determine the location of the worker using the position sensing components and transmit this location to a central server or central dispatch. In this manner, the dispatch may monitor the location of a particular mobile worker. Such location monitoring may be used to verify the productivity of the worker and may also be used to determine which of a number of mobile workers should receive dispatches to certain jobs.
For example, a utility service worker may carry such a wireless communication device that has position sensing capability. A dispatch may receive periodic updates from the wireless communication device indicating the position of the mobile worker. In the event that a new job comes into the dispatch which needs to be sent to a mobile worker to complete, the dispatch may send such a job to a worker in close proximity to the location of the new job. Similarly, in the trucking industry it is often desirable to monitor the progress of a shipment using such a tracking feature.
However, such location tracking has raised privacy concerns for many mobile workers. Particularly, such workers have concerns that such tracking while the worker is performing personal tasks or is not working on a specific work-related job may impinge on personal privacy.